This is just get-through-the-week stuff.

The problem is the agency we are appropriating money to has demonstrated with great clarity that it is spectacularly dysfunctional.

The problem is the agency we are appropriating money to has demonstrated with great clarity that it is spectacularly dysfunctional,

every day that we delay professionalizing FEMA and depoliticizing it is another day that taxpayers' money is being spent by an agency which has been demonstrated under these circumstances to be incompetent.

This is on a magnitude we've never done before.

I think this goes far broader than public broadcasting. I think across the board there is an effort by Republican ideologues to force institutions across society to bend to their will. You see it in [House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay's raising hell with the courts and demanding they pursue his brand of justice. . . . You see it in this action here.